Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (32 page)

As sex becomes less protected and less guarded, sexual experiences no longer represent the specialized access they may once have. Other aspects of self— more guarded aspects of self—become understood as more difficult to access; they replace the naked body as the metaphor and means for the knowing of another. Because intimacy is constituted through and by experiences of others that are normally restricted, the quest for intimacy becomes the effort to find aspects of selves that are more restricted than sexuality.

Understanding intimacy as the experience of achieving access to protected aspects of others’ selves provides a theoretical framework for understanding the intimacy of interpersonal violence. Nonconsensual violence (what most people mean when they say “real violence”) transgresses physical, social, emotional,

and ethical boundaries between actors. Perpetrators of interpersonal violence gain access to experiences of others that most do not. The “sneaky thrills” that Jack Katz finds among thieves are intimate thrills (1988). The sexual metaphor he uncovers in the narratives of the thieves follows, for the thrill in both het- eronormative eroticism and theft lies in gaining access. To violate, and to be violated, are intimate experiences. If we cease to reserve the word “intimate” for situations that are desirable or healthy, we can see, for example, the intimacy of violent crime. Rape, which many of us would shudder to consider “intimacy,” is so heinous precisely
because
it is so intimate.

The social situation of murder,
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from this perspective, becomes the most intimate act imaginable. Murder not only transgresses all social, moral, and personal boundaries, but it facilitates and provides access to the experience of death. For the murderer, the infliction of death grants access to an experience that cannot be replicated in another moment, or with another person; no one else has ever witnessed the same expression on the victim’s face, heard him draw his last breath, or watched the life leave her eyes. Simultaneously, the murderer eliminates the potential for future access to any other aspects of self; no one will see any expression on the victim’s face again. Murder grants the murderer the ultimate access to the self of another, in very same moment in which it is destroyed.

The victim shares with her killer the same intimacy; a particular experi- ence she can have only once, with only the person (or people) present in this moment, and after which she will have no other. Her murder grants her access to the self of the murderer that is normally restricted—even in the case of serial killers, the vast majority of people do not know this aspect of the murderer’s self and do not see him in these moments. Those who have seen him in these moments are likely no longer alive; the victim is the only person alive with direct, lived, felt access to these aspects of the murderer’s self.

In sharp contrast with most intimacy research, particularly in social psychol- ogy and in psychology, this perspective does not treat intimacy as, inherently, an experience of closeness and connectedness, but as the experience of access- ing in another that which is normally thought inaccessible. This is not to draw a qualitative or ethical parallel between violent crime and SM, in which intimacy
is
a reciprocal and positive experience. The intimacy of SM play illustrates the limitations of current thinking about intimacy. My aim here is to explore the process of the construction of intimacy in SM toward a reconceptualization of intimacy more broadly, and to illustrate the potential implications of this rethinking. Understanding intimacy as a phenomenological experience that

may not result in feelings of mutual closeness and connectedness is important in understanding a range of social phenomena from pedophilia to murder.

In the analysis of intimacy as, ultimately, interpersonal access, intimacy cuts across all kinds of social interaction. It is created through social experiences of disclosure and of boundary transgression, and through sites of potential trust violations. At the root of the pathologization of intersections of violence and the erotic as social processes and judgments is what they have in common. Because both provide access to the body in ways that are normally protected; both can, and often do, construct intimate experience. The various conditions under which access is gained, under which disclosure occurs, constitute differ- ent paths to intimacy. While experiences of intimacy are different when access is consensual and reciprocal than when it is not, it does not cease to be intimate simply because it is unwanted, unpleasant, or violent. For the concept of “inti- macy” to be of more analytic and theoretical value, it needs to be extricated from the conceptual mire of sex, love, and romance.

SM, Intimacy, and Trust

Intimate experiences are always created through interpersonal access. The emo- tional dimensions of intimacy are qualitatively different across different situa- tions. The intimacy of SM is not the same as the intimacy of violent crime. On the most obvious level, this is because SM is a consensual activity and violent crime is not. Debates about SM have raged around the issue of consent; SM defenders use consent to argue that SM should not be understood as coercive, as violent, or as a mechanism of oppression. Anti-SM activists have objected to this on the grounds that it obscures the false consciousness that accompanies oppres- sion.
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These conversations often begin and end with the idea of consent, though, neglecting to unpack the ways in which emotional and psychological experiences
change
with consent—specifically, experiences of trust and of violation.

In nonconsensual violence, access is experienced as violation. We use the phrase “I feel violated” to describe the sense that a boundary has been crossed and we do not like the way we feel. It may be felt as a violation of the body or of personhood, but nonconsensual violence is a violation also of trust. It is a violation of our trust in humanity, or in a particular person, in our own abil- ity to assess situations, to judge others correctly, to prevent the violation or to escape from it.

When any of these trusts is breached in the gaining of access to some aspect of our lives, selves, or identities, we feel violated. The violator, however, has still

gained access to this normally restricted experience. Because of this, the
posi- tive
experience of intimacy—the warm, positive feeling of connectedness that has come to characterize all intimacy—is not reciprocal. A rapist may feel that a rape was intimate, but the victim does not. When access is gained without consent, the subsequent distancing is a rejection of the intimacy, a refusal to condone the intimacy of the violation. Nonconsensual access, in this view, is in a sense, cheating; it circumvents the role of trust, obtaining access by force rather than consent.

To be violated is an intimate experience, yet violation changes intimacy. It is the feeling of unwelcome intimate experience, but there is no being violated without feelings of intimacy. The warm, positive feeling that people mean when they speak of “intimacy” is the state of
appreciation
of that transgression. If we do not appreciate the transgression—if the transgression has been viola- tive—this does not necessarily render the experience less intimate, conceptu- ally. It only makes it undesirable and unacceptable. This feeling of violation that arises from trust having been breached, characteristic of nonconsensual violence, causes a reluctance to consider violence intimate.

SM play is fundamentally based on trust. It is not violative, but it is poten- tially so, always and deliberately. It plays with the dialectic relationship between trust and risk. SM is about plunging repeatedly into a risk-trust cycle, one that revels in the risks of betrayal and harm and incompetence, to emerge from them without having been betrayed, harmed, or found incompetent. Through this cycle, SM participants achieve a sense of understanding another and of being understood that cannot be created elsewhere. The “connection” of which SM participants speak exists in this space—it is the feeling of riding on the suspension, the thrill of the unknown and the risk of the violation.

It is here, in this unknown, risky space, that intimate experience is con- structed and understood as such. This space of potential violation—the risk- trust cycle—carves a space in which this vulnerability is performed and lived and felt. Participation in this cycle thus constitutes an experience of access to one another that cannot occur outside these spaces of potential violation. Through transgressing interpersonal boundaries, access is granted. Through immersing oneself in the potential for violations of trust and body and mind, still other access is granted—through this access, intimacy is constructed.

If intimacy is access to pieces of the self that are otherwise inaccessible, then even the threat of violation is an inherently intimate space. Violations of the body that do not explicitly violate trust grant access to the body and to carnal responses that are normally unavailable—and thus these violations are

intimate. The granting of trust and the being trusted for these violations of flesh alone are intimate experiences. The potential, however, for that trust to be violated results in feelings of intimacy on still another level. The cost of a trust violation exceeds the cost of a carnal violation; a trust violation not only shat- ters trust, but injures the body in unanticipated and undesired ways. Through play, participants engage in practices of trust, and thus in risking violation.

In reveling in a trust-risk-access cycle, participants feel knowing of, and knowable to, another. When the scene fails, this intimacy fails; in SM, when the outcomes are unfavorable, participants feel like strangers to one another. Trust, on this level, is the trust that players deeply understand one another; it is destroyed when participants in a scene feel like strangers.

Stories of failed SM scenes illustrate this. Sophie, for example, had been engaged in a long and intimate play relationship with Carl, a friend whom she deeply trusted. During the scene she recounts below, Carl changed his approach, and Sophie subsequently felt that Carl was somehow not quite himself. Sophie and Carl never quite recovered from the incident; though they remained friends and tried to play again, it was, according to Sophie, never the same.

He was very much a rope top. That was his big thing, was bondage. And he was excellent at bondage. And our dynamic was always—I mean, yes, he would absolutely hurt me when the time came for that, but there was also always this element—even when he was hurting me, it was done in this incredibly, like, touchingly caring way. And especially when he was tying me up, it was this soothing, wonderful thing.

So one day, Ari and I are over at Carl and Sasha’s, and the plan was to play later in the evening, if we decide we feel like it, which we do. Carl starts a scene with me. Carl has decided in his head, from all the things that he’s heard me say about how I play with Ari, that that’s what I really want from an interaction, in order for it to be the most gratifying and valuable. So we proceeded to have a scene where Carl was not Carl. And I didn’t stop it because it was so like, I couldn’t understand what was going on. I couldn’t understand why it felt so horrible. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, because I trust him completely. [ . . . ] I just couldn’t figure out what the problem is, I felt horrible through the whole thing. And he was so out of touch with me that he wasn’t even aware of how horrible I was feeling. The scene went on for some time. It ended with him putting a rope noose around my neck, and then knocking me off-balance. It was just the most jarring, horrible [ . . . ] and the second it was over, I just like burst

into tears. I was just, like, you know, traumatized. And he was like, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” [and] he carried me into the other room. I said something like, “Where did my Carly go?” and then he started to cry. [ . . . ] He’s like, “I was trying to give you this sadistic experience.”

In Sophie’s story, Carl’s risk backfires. His efforts led Sophie to feel that she did not
know him
so well as she had previously felt, and, because he had made this particular decision in the first place, that he “knew” her less well also. The risks were unsuccessful; each ended up emotionally distraught and distant. Ultimately, they sacrificed the relationship.

The risk-trust cycle in which SM participants immerse themselves constructs spaces for potential violations, thereby constituting the ultimate emotional edge of SM play. This potentially violative space is itself transgressive; it negotiates social, ethical, and interpersonal boundaries. It grants access to aspects of par- ticipants’ selves that are otherwise inaccessible. The vulnerability of play is the access to one’s own experience of opening oneself up to potential violations on physical, psychological, and emotional levels.

Intimacy and Edgework

The SM community in Caeden is built around SM as a recreational endeavor. It is a serious leisure pursuit through which intimacy is constructed. More specifically, it can be best understood as edgework. Like Jennifer Lois’s rescue workers with their victims, SM players grant each other access to presenta- tions of emotions that they do not feel, let alone grant access to, under normal circumstances. It is in this access to emotion, the condition of being privy to self-disclosure, where intimacy is created and experienced. Lois argues that the intimacy she finds among rescue workers is born of access to “aspects of the self that can only be constructed through an intense interaction with another” (Lois 2003, 172). Because these unprecedented selves transpire in the circum- stances in which they are constructed, the sharing of the circumstances creates the sense of knowing, and of being known to, each other.

To the extent that SM scenes involve the transgression of bodily boundaries, access creates intimacy. Even beyond that, though, because SM scenes often involve altered states, normal mechanisms of self-presentation are sometimes unavailable. Because these presentations are sometimes unpredictable and less intended for public consumption, access to this back-stage information also contributes to experiences of intimacy. Importantly, this is the case not only